Obama's Relevance: American Jobs Act
Jules Witcover

As President Obama tours the country calling on voters to demand that Congress "pass this jobs bill right away," he needs to aim beyond the obstructionist Republicans on Capitol Hill, to the top Democrat in the Senate.

When Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was asked other day when he would bring up Obama's American Jobs Act, his answer was: "We'll get to that." First, he said, the Senate will be taking up a bill pushing China on trade. "I don't think there's anything more important for a jobs measure than China trade, and that's what we're going to be working on next week," Reid said.

Nothing better illustrated Obama's current image as weak and ineffective than the soft-spoken but iron-willed majority leader telling the president and the leader of their party to bug off.

"We understand that there's conversations going on about the president's jobs bill, which I support, I'm in agreement with," Reid said. "We'll get to that. But let's get some of these other things done that we have to get done first."

There could not have been, either, a better example of how Reid seems impervious to public opinion, and how his focus on legislative sausage-making in the Senate is taking a front seat to the critical task of convincing voters that the Obama administration is at last zeroing in on job creation.

Why the Senate Democrats continue to put the cranky and charisma-disadvantaged Reid in the spotlight as their chief spokesman, and why they would tolerate such a conspicuous nose-thumbing to the president on his urgent campaign to put the country back to work, defies logic and good sense.

Technically, the legislative branch is coequal to the executive, and Obama has no constitutional power to tell the Senate Democrats which of their colleagues should be the majority leader. But the administration cries out for a Senate boss in lockstep with the president on the one issue that can make or break his chances for re-election next year.

Even before this latest show of putting his own agenda before the president's political need, Reid has displayed an irritating contrariness of his own. While Obama is undergoing a character transplant by abandoning his Mr. Nice Guy persona in favor of getting tough with the Republicans, he needs to show his new self to Reid as well.

Perhaps the White House thinking is that the president needs some time to get out among the voters and do a more intensive selling job of his jobs bill before having the Senate go at it. The barrage of television ads featuring Obama pitching the bill, including him plaintively calling on Congress to get on the stick, indicates the White House level of urgency.

But Reid's seemingly uncooperative approach is an open invitation to the GOP leadership on Capitol Hill to mock the message as hollow, even though odds seem next to none that the Republicans will buy into any major portion of the president's bill. Some of its main features, including elimination of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and a modicum of new spending, have been declared non-starters on the other side of the aisle.

It's one thing for the GOP congressional leaders like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor give the finger to the President of the United States on his single most-imperative legislative proposal of the season. For the Senate leader of his own party to tell him in effect that he'll have to wait his turn to get it on the docket only reinforces growing public doubts about Obama's leadership and resolution to get things done.

It's a political peril that his Democratic predecessor in the Oval Office, Bill Clinton, faced in 1995 when challenged by House Speaker Newt Gingrich over the federal budget. Taunted earlier about diminished clout, Clinton declared "the president is relevant here," and he subsequently called Gingrich's bluff over shutting the government down. Obama could use some such test of his relevancy, by demanding that Reid take up the jobs bill in the Senate immediately as priority No. 1.